Bücher der Reihe Studies in English Language

Why do recordings of speakers engaging in reported speech at British Prime Minister's Questions from the 1970s-80s sound so distant to us? This cutting-edge study explores how the practices of quoting have changed at parliamentary question time in light of changing conventions and an evolving media landscape. Comparing data from authentic audio and video recordings from 1978-1988 and 2003-2013, it provides evidence for qualitative and quantitative changes at the micro level (e.g., grammaticalisation processes in the reporting clause) and in more global structures (e.g., rhetorical patterns, and activities). These analytic findings contribute to the theoretical modelling of evidentiality in English, our understanding of constructions, interaction, and change, and of PMQs as an evolving community of practice. One of the first large-scale studies of recent change in an interactional genre of English, this ground-breaking monograph offers a framework for a diachronic interactional sociolinguistic research programme.

This book provides both fresh insights into sixteenth and seventeenth-century spelling standardisation in England, and an exploration of the history of the printed book and its development in the socio-cultural history of the time. It is essential reading for those interested in writing systems and the history of the English.

Ideal for researchers and students in English historical linguistics and syntax, this comprehensive study traces the development of phrasal verbs from early modern to present-day English. Based on large amounts of empirical evidence it shows the phrasal verb to be one of the most idiosyncratic features of English.

Investigates the change and evolution of a fascinating English construction - comparative correlatives (e.g. the more you eat, the fatter you get). This book will appeal to scholars and advanced students in English linguistics, grammar, syntax, and the history of the English language.

An intensive overview of Mexican American English, linking it to the speech of other immigrant groups worldwide. This study is of particular interest to students and researchers in linguistics, as it provides insight into language contact, immigrant groups' response to majority cultures, and an analysis of language-transfer effects.

Have you ever wondered whether to spell a particular compound with a space or a hyphen - and why? This book discusses what compounds are and how they differ from other linguistic units. It provides a detailed analysis of English compound spelling and suggests a rule of thumb for doubtful cases.

A new, thought-provoking account of the theory of grammar and language processing, based on the analysis of authentic speech produced in real time. Drawing on insights from cognitive psychology, neurolinguistics and conversation analysis, the author offers a fascinating, easy-to-follow account of why spoken English is structured the way it is.

Taking a corpus-based approach, this innovative and groundbreaking text maps regional grammatical variation in written American English. A statistical analysis of these maps demonstrates for the first time that regional variation exists in written Standard American English, and identifies modern American dialect regions.

Richly illustrated throughout with textual analyses, this book challenges widely held beliefs about grammatical complexity, academic writing, and linguistic change in English. This important new work will be of interest to discourse analysts, sociolinguists, and applied linguists, as well as descriptive linguists and historical linguists.

Why does English pronunciation differ from other related languages? This book addresses this and other questions by analysing a high number of innovative Middle English spellings. Stenbrenden explores the changes in long-vowel pronunciation, using empirical data to date, localise and interpret the beginning of these changes.

This book provides a fresh approach to Singapore English, by focusing on its cultural connotations. The author, a native Singaporean, explores a range of aspects of this rich variety of English - including address forms, social categories, particles and interjections - and links particular words to particular cultural norms.

This study explores 'signalling nouns' - nouns whose meaning can only be determined by the context in which they are used. It investigates how they function in academic discourse, what their semantic properties are, and the linguistic environments in which they can and cannot occur.

What makes the noun phrase 'the man I saw' more complex than 'the man'? Designed for researchers and students interested in questions of language complexity, this book aims to answer that question by exploring variation in more than three billion words of British and American data.

This book presents an in-depth study of English as spoken in two major anglophone Caribbean territories, Jamaica and Trinidad. The discussion is situated in the context of variation in the Caribbean and the wider context of world Englishes, and sociolinguistics.

Drawing on recent developments in the field of indexicality, world Englishes and corpus research, Jakob Leimgruber offers readers a new way of thinking about and analysing the unique syntactic, semantic and phonological structure of Singapore English.

Is construction grammar a useful framework for the study of language change? Hilpert combines the current linguistic theory of construction grammar with advanced corpus-based methodology in order to study language change in a new way. This new perspective has wide-ranging consequences for the way historical linguists think about language change.

English comment clauses such as I think and you know have been widely studied in present-day English. This study, however, constitutes the first full-length treatment of the history of comment clauses in the English language, and proposes a varied and complex conception of their development.

Early English texts did not have a convention of quotation marks for reporting direct speech. This raises problems for interpreting and understanding represented discourse. Colette Moore examines the strategies pre-modern texts used to indicate direct speech and the implications of these strategies for reading Middle and Early Modern English works.

An exploration of grammatical differences between British English dialects, drawing on authentic speech data collected in over thirty counties. The book presents a new approach known as 'corpus-based dialectometry', which focuses on the joint quantitative measurement of dozens of grammatical features to gauge regional differences.

An examination of the influence of nineteenth-century philology on European thought. Haruko Momma considers, among other matters, the impact of William Jones's discovery of Sanskrit on historical studies of language and culture, the Philological Society's role in the making of the OED, and the rise of English studies at universities.

The first investigation of hyperbole in English, drawing on genres such as spoken language, TV, newspapers, and literary works. Using approaches from semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis and classical rhetoric, it explores both speaker- and addressee-related aspects of hyperbole, and shows it to be an important contributor to language change.

Preposition placement refers to the competition between preposition stranding (What is he talking about?) and pied-piping (About what is he talking?). This volume provides a full grammatical account of preposition placement in English, and will be of interest to syntacticans, second-language researchers, and those working on variation in English.

An examination of the current status, history and principal features of Canadian English. The book includes a discussion of the number and distribution of speakers of Canadian English, a review of its history and a comparison of its vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar to standard British and American English.

Using the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560-1760, in this book Culpeper and Kytoe offer a unique account of the linguistic features in speech-related genres of writing. Through this, they are able to provide a fascinating insight into what spoken interaction in Early Modern English might have been like.

How did grammatical gender in English get replaced by a system dependent on natural gender? How is this related to 'irregular agreement' (she for ships) and 'sexist' language use (generic he) in Modern English? This study, based on extensive corpus data, offers an important historical perspective on these controversial questions.

This 2007 book traces the development of Irish English from the late Middle Ages to the present day, revealing how it arose, how it has developed, and how it continues to change. Considering issues at all levels of linguistics, it will be invaluable to historical linguists, sociolinguists, syntacticians, and phonologists alike.

Standard English has evolved in many ways over the past hundred years. From pronunciation to vocabulary to grammar, this concise survey clearly documents the recent history of Standard English. Essential reading for anyone interested in language change in progress, it will be welcomed by students, researchers and language teachers alike.

Apposition in Contemporary English is a detailed discussion of the linguistic relation apposition and its usage in various kinds of speech and writing.

This book explores the spread of English in China from the seventeenth century to the present day. Kingsley Bolton uses a fascinating variety of sources to uncover a history of Chinese Englishes which dates from the era of Chinese pidgin English to the emergence of Hong Kong English and beyond.

This study explores different types of noun phrase in English, discussing the interaction between their form, meaning and use. Drawing on authentic examples, it addresses the question of how different noun phrases are structured, and how we produce and understand them - shedding light on the nature of linguistic classification.